No1Brands4You

UP Global Sourcing, founded in 1997, are leaders in branding, sourcing and distribution. The company successfully services its retail partners with branded, licensed and own label ranges, covering home & garden, apparel, sports & leisure, travel, toys & gifts. UPGS has offices in the UK and Hong Kong and Guangzhou, China. UPGS is the holding company for No1Brands4You, which itself has over 20 years of experience in selling a wide range of reliable products including home and housewares, electricals, luggage, DIY, watches and much more. No1Brands4You is behind such household brand names as Beldray and Intempo.

Category: Consumer products

Challenge: Multichannel

Results: 50% growth in year 2, 25% in year 3

Benefits: Halved fulfilment & shipping process

Multichannel Confidence

Martin McEwing, eCommerce Manager for No1Brands4You: “We’ve been sourcing, importing, creating and distributing products for over two decades, negotiating with brands for license deals as suppliers and in some cases buying the brands outright. We have the license to make and distribute some very well known brand names, and we also produce ‘own label’ homewares for the high street.

“We were always business-to-business in our dealings. Then, four years ago we decided we were ready to sell to customers directly, and that meant getting into ecommerce. Our requirements were to support multichannel, multi-marketplace and all of our websites. We looked at a range of suppliers, but people in the business either knew or had used Volo, and for this sort of investment it’s a confidence thing. You’ve got your brands and your reputation riding on the decision, so we chose Volo.

Efficiency Gains

“The ‘soft’ management aspects are really important to me when I think about how Volo helps us. We can easily list products across multiple platforms, organise promotions and sales order processing is easy too. Volo pulls it all together for us. We do an auto-export from Volo into Sage accounting as well, so it’s pretty much an end-to-end solution for us.

“Volo worked closely with us to optimise how we use the software. An account manager came down to visit with us and made some tweaks to our picking and packing screens. Those tweaks halved our fulfilment and despatch process. These kinds of automation benefits save us having to employ more members of staff, for sure. I would say Volo saves us 2 or 3 members of staff, which means our staffing would have to be nearly doubled without it.”

Multichannel Coverage

“We didn’t know the true potential of the ecommerce side, but I’m glad we had the foresight to go with Volo. Ultimate Products and No1Brands4You now have 5 Amazon accounts, 5 eBay accounts, we’re on Rakuten and we have 10 full ecommerce websites. All of these run on the Volo platform. Volo is a full service. Their creative team did all our websites and our eBay shop front. It’s going very well. From a standing start we grew extremely quickly, but what impressed me most was the growth after that. Our second year growth was a full 50%, and the next was 25%.

“International Sales is easy to do with Volo. We’re already in Spain, Italy and Germany. Next stop is Poland and France. Beyond that, we’re looking at the China markets. They’re a tough nut to crack, but we have long established presences in Asia and we’re determined to find a way.”